Major James Coldwell - CCF Leader

CCF Leader

When Woodsworth resigned as CCF leader in 1942, shortly before his death, Coldwell was unanimously elected the party's new national leader and president. He led the party through five general elections. After an upsurge of support for the party in the mid-1940s, the party embarked on a long decline during the Cold War. The Liberals, appropriated many of the CCF's policies, and made them government policy. Liberal governments implementing unemployment insurance, family allowances,and universal old age pensions stole much of the CCF's thunder with the electorate and one of the reasons that the party's electoral fortunes took a downward turn during the prosperous 1950s. Coldwell, mostly cared that his party's policies were becoming law, and was not too concerned if he and the CCF received little, if any, credit for them.

In 1945, Prime Minister MacKenzie King offered Coldwell a Cabinet post in his government. When Coldwell refused, MacKenzie King made another offer, that would have made him the next Liberal leader, and by extension, the Prime Minister of Canada. Again Coldwell, refused, mainly due to his loyalty to his party, and its principles, when he stated that "if the country needed me in the Prime Minister's chair, then it would be at the head of a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government and not as a member of a party with views and politics contradictory to those in which I believed." Rumours that King made Coldwell an offer became public during the 1946 by-election campaign in the Parkdale electoral district. On October 11, while attending a rally for the CCF's by-election candidate, Ford Brand, at Parkdale Collegiate Institute, a partisan audience member asked him about the rumour that he was offered the leadership of the federal Liberal Party. Coldwell responded by stating that there was no official offer, and that "...the Liberals thought they could buy Coldwell. Coldwell is not for sale."